Never a dull moment with the rich and dysfunctional

By FRANCES GRANT

Money can't buy happiness. A truism, yet British black comedy-drama At Home With the Braithwaites (TV One, 8.30pm) has managed to squeeze an astonishing amount of action from this simple theme.

When matriarch Alison Braithwaite (Amanda Redman) won £38 million ($107 million) on the lottery she decided to keep her windfall from the family and establish a charitable trust. But it's hard to conceal that kind of dosh, and the effect on the family of her winnings was to take their average-sized troubles and transform them into super-deluxe dysfunction.

Husband David (Peter Davison, who may have finally put Dr Who and that nice vet on All Creatures Great and Small behind him with this role) had an affair with his secretary. Alison had an affair with her brother-in-law Graham, keen to get his hands on her money.

Graham got his comeuppance when pushed down a pit by homicidal youngest daughter Charlotte, who, seeing the passive-aggressive approach was going nowhere, decided to take affirmative action.

Another daughter, York University student Virginia (Sarah Smart), discovered she was a lesbian, which made for an interesting family Christmas. Virginia's lovelife has been more complex than a feminist-Marxist-deconstructionist lit crit session, with her heart fluttering between sultry older woman Megan and the sweet Tamsin.

Virginia stole a serious amount of money from Alison's trust to woo Megan with. Meanwhile, Tamsin got pregnant in a revenge return to heterosexuality. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned ... by another woman.

Meanwhile, middle daughter, the teenage Sarah, had a crush on her drama teenager, who turned out to be gay. So Sarah got pregnant to Phil. Are we keeping up?

Outside the main action of infidelities and confused sexualities, there were the small subplots: when David and Alison decided to give their marriage another chance, the girls paid Megan to test their father's newfound fidelity to their mother by paying her to try to seduce him.

In terms of their wider fortunes, the family moved into a mansion, Alison took the family to Buckingham Palace to get a damehood. She discovered she was pregnant but not to David. Then the newspapers got on to her case when they discovered her winning ticket was bought by Charlotte, under the legal gambling age. Never a dull moment.

The fourth and final season of the drama returns tonight with David and Alison planning an amicable divorce. As if. Let's just see how the division of the matrimonial property goes. It's hard to imagine goings-on in the Braithwaites' household could get any more far-fetched and farcical than they have already. But this is a family not to be underestimated.